Time Will Run Back by Henry Hazlitt Page B

Plans by their own ‘Four-Year Plans. These were, of course, like ours, all State plans. Incredible as it now seems, these people actually seemed to believe that calling them Four-Year Plans instead of Five-Year Plans would prevent everybody from recognizing the imitation. In fact, some of them were too stupid even to know at first that they were imitating.”
    He stopped to pour himself a glass of water.
    “In brief, step by step the capitalistic world accepted the basic premise of communism—that the individual, left to himself, is greedy, callous, stupid and irresponsible; that ‘individualism’ and ‘liberty’ are simply euphemisms for dog-eat-dog, the law-of-the-jungle, the-devil-take-the-hindmost—in short, euphemisms for anarchy—and that only the State has responsibility, only the State has wisdom, only the State can be just, only the State can be trusted with power. They accepted this premise, but they lacked the courage or the clarity to follow it to its logical end. They lacked the courage to see that the individual, because he is responsible to nobody, must be deprived of all power, and that the State, the State representing all the people, must be the sole depositor of all the power, the sole maker of decisions, the sole judge of its own—”
    He pulled himself up. “I hadn’t meant to get into all of this just now. But is it any surprise that the capitalist world was defeated? Is it any surprise that it kept losing supporters both from the outside and from the inside? Do you know what the American political leaders did at one time? They threw huge sums of money around the world to try to bribe the rest of the world not to go communist! They thought they could buy off faith by dollars!”
    “And what happened?”
    “What would you expect to happen? The other bourgeois countries found that the easiest way to get money out of the Disunited States was to hint that they might go communist if they didn’t get it. Soon they began to believe themselves that their chief reason for not going communist was as a favor to the Disunited States, and that their chief reason for arming against us was not for their own preservation but again as a favor to the Disunited States! If bourgeois America wanted them to arm, they felt, it could jolly well pay for it! And they used most of the other American funds, anyway, to finance socialist programs—in other words, to move in the direction of communism!”
    He grinned, then turned suddenly serious again. “Should there be any surprise that while they could bribe only a few spies among us , we had swarms of voluntary spies among them —people who gave us information gladly, of their own will; people whom we did not have to pay; people who ‘betrayed their countries,’ to use the phrase of condemnation that the capitalist nations tried to adopt—people who betrayed their countries exultantly, from a sense of duty, because their countries were wrong, and because they were serving a higher cause, the cause of humanity!” Peter was deeply impressed by the passion and conviction of this man. “Well, I hope you’ll forgive me,” said Bolshekov, “if I keep getting carried away from my point.”
    “No, no,” said Peter; “all this is precisely what I need to learn. But may I ask one question? Why did the bourgeois countries fight against communism at all?”
    “They fought against communism because they were ‘against’ communism. That was the only point on which they could agree. But they didn’t know what they were for . Everybody was for something different. Nobody had the courage to defend a capitalism that was true to the basic premises of capitalism. Each had his own little plan for a ‘reformed’ capitalism. They could stave off communism, they thought, only by ‘correcting abuses’; but all their plans for correcting abuses were steps toward socialism and communism. They quarreled among themselves as to how far they wanted to go toward communism in